I Am... Orange and nowhere to be seen in the natural listings

I passed by the new Orange billboard on Deansgate Manchester today.


If you look closely there's a  call to action at the bottom that reads "search online for 'i am'," so I thought, "let's have a look." I did a quick search on Google and here's what I found -



Click to enlarge the image in a new window

Now wouldn't you have thought a company as big as Orange would have optimised the website I-am-everyone.co.uk for SEO rather than spending on PPC?

Well a bit further digging and I found this on NMA - For Justin Billingsley, brand director of Orange UK, using a search call-to-action rather than a URL is a logical step. "We're trying to get the maximum number of people to see this campaign, so we can ask them to remember either a URL or just two short words," he says."

There are several problems with this idea. The first is that most people equate the natural listings as the most relevant and accurate results for their search query and would naturally look for the result they were looking for in the main listings. Secondly the organic results that appear are not very flattering -  the first listing is I Am Bored .  

Thirdly, and most importantly, the adwords advert at the top of the page is not very interesting. To be honest both myself and several colleagues didn't even spot it at first!! If ever there was an example of the need to place a great power advert it was here.

For me this campaign falls flat in that it makes people work to find the information they are searching for - the exact antithesis of why people use search - they want to find information quickly and with the minimum fuss.

If you want an affiliate mobile phone site so you can bid on the term "I am" or just want to double your branding power by using both PPC and SEO then give us a call on 0800 072 8717 or email us.